Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  In the Arab world speculation and anger raged. Somewhere in the innuendos and half-truths certain inescapable facts floated to the surface. Mossad had used a lethal chemical agent to kill newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell when he’d threatened to expose Mossad’s activities in his newspapers unless they agreed to help bail him out of his serious financial problems. Dr. Ian West, the Home Office pathologist who’d conducted Maxwell’s autopsy, had written in his report (a copy of which the author possesses): “We cannot rule out homicide being the cause.”

  Mossad had used a drug to try and assassinate the Hamas leader on the streets of Amman, Jordan (see the chapter 6, “Avengers”). Since the start of the new millennium, Mossad agents have been credited with poisoning over a dozen terrorists by using a variety of lethal drugs that can never be traced. Some were designed to act slowly. Others were fast acting so that by the time medical intervention came, it was too late—and the drug was no longer detectable in the victim’s body. All these weapons had been created at Israel’s Institute for Biological Research (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate” pages 341–42).

  As Arafat’s condition further deteriorated, his aides said he had suffered a brain haemorrhage, a stroke caused by bleeding into the brain. Could that be true? The hospital spokesman would not say.

  On Thursday, November 12, Yasser Arafat died in the early hours of the morning. The hospital spokesman told waiting reporters there would be no details released on tests of the cause of death. There would be no autopsy. And so Mossad’s bête noire died mysteriously, surrounded by secrecy. He was brought back to his compound and buried in Ramallah the next day in a concrete coffin, which had been hastily constructed some days before. There were two reasons for this unusual casket, Dr. al-Kurdi said. Arafat’s body would be preserved for an autopsy to be conducted and then he could be replaced in his concrete casket and one day be buried in the holiest of all mosques in the Muslim world—the one in Jerusalem.

  When Meir Dagan heard this, he is said to have smiled. There was also a more important matter on his mind. The day before, hours after Arafat died, Mordechai Vanunu had been arrested in his rooms in St. George’s Church in Jerusalem. He was charged with once more revealing classified information about Israel. Three months previously, Vanunu had said he would like to give up his Israeli citizenship and become a Palestinian. Vanunu said his one great wish was to be received by Yasser Arafat. The whistleblower’s naïveté had not been tempered by his long sojourn in prison or his short months of freedom since his release. There can be little doubt that if the two men had ever been allowed to meet, Arafat would have exploited the occasion. He was a master of manipulation. In the end he had died as he had lived: amid confusion, intrigue, and farce. If he had been poisoned, no one now would ever know. If he had not, Arafat had left a legacy that would continue to promote the idea.

  For years Arafat had operated according to the chaos theory of politics: as long as the Palestinians remained a festering problem for Israel, he would stoke the fires of not only his followers but the entire Muslim world. In his famous speech to the United Nations General Assembly that had marked his entry as a revolutionary icon, taking his place alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Arafat had declared, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat, do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

  On the day of Arafat’s death, at a briefing later to his senior aides on what Arafat’s death could foretell, Meir Dagan said that the only tragedy about Arafat’s death was that it had not come sooner because Arafat had failed to ever let go of the gun.

  CHAPTER 21

  A NEW CALIPHATE OF TERROR

  The sixth floor of Mossad headquarters, with its olive-painted corridors and office doors that each bore a number in Hebrew but no name, housed the analysts, psychologists, behaviorists, and forward planners. Collectively known as “the specialists,” following Yasser Arafat’s death they had combined their skills to evaluate and exploit how it was being perceived in the Arab world and beyond.

  Their conclusions would guide Israel’s future military and political moves in such key areas as prime minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the relationship Israel should now have with the Palestinian Liberation Organistation, the PLO.

  The withdrawal was to take place in the high summer of 2005. It would be the first time that Israel had handed back settlements since its pullout from the Sinai in 1978 after the Camp David agreement had brought peace with Egypt. But already in the wake of Arafat’s death, the withdrawal was being promoted by the PLO as the first step in finally creating a meaningful Palestine state that had been Arafat’s abiding dream. But the Gaza Strip settlers saw their eviction as a betrayal of Israel’s right to reclaim the land it had once occupied in biblical times. Their feelings of treachery were all the greater since the evacuation had been the work of Ariel Sharon, long regarded as the most powerful supporter of the settler movement.

  The Mossad analysts shared the view of deputy prime minister Shimon Peres: “Zionism was built on geography but it lives on demography.” They saw the realpolitik motives that had made Sharon order the razing of twenty-one Jewish settlements that lay along a stretch of the Mediterranean. To protect their eight thousand inhabitants from the surrounding 1.3 million Palestinians was a huge drain on Israel’s resources.

  To defend the settlements on the West Bank, Sharon had ordered the erection of a towering security barrier of reinforced concrete and razor wire that snaked down the length of the country; it meant Israel’s effective border would be extended.

  Like the majority of Israelis, the analysts were preoccupied by how soon Peres’s prescient remark would become a reality. The forward planners on the sixth floor had calculated that by 2010 the number of Arabs living between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean would surpass the projected 5.2 million Jews living in Israel at the end of the decade.

  In the months before his death, Arafat had predicted that not only would Gaza be “cleansed” of its Jewish settlers, but that the West Bank would also see the departure of its settlers from the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria.

  The analysts had advised Meir Dagan that Arafat had left a legacy fraught with risk. They predicted that while the PLO would use the withdrawal from Gaza as a huge propaganda victory, Palestinian extremists like Hamas would defy calls by the PLO leadership to stop attacks on the settlements. It had turned out to be true.

  The evacuation was conducted with overwhelming force by the Israeli army. Afterward synagogues left by the settlers were burned to the ground by Hamas militants. Following a short interval, the suicide bomb attacks on Israel resumed. Hamas justified them by presenting the Gaza withdrawal as no more than a maneuvre by Israel to create more misery and frustration for the Palestinians. “Until the last Jew is removed from our land there can be no peace,” Hamas said.

  Throughout Arafat’s life the PLO and Hamas had competed for control of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000; each had aimed to persuade the shebab, the Arab youth, whose support was crucial in the direction the fight against Israel would take. By the second Intifada, when suicide bombings became the main symbol as Islamists and Fatah activists blew themselves up while killing as many as they could in Israeli pizzerias and restaurants, at bus stations and marketplaces—and Islamic religious leaders called for all-out jihad on the grounds that all Israelis, including women and children, were legitimate targets because Israel was a military society—Arafat was pressured into taking action against the terrorists, not only by Ariel Sharon, but also by moderate elements in the Arab world. Arafat still possessed a political legitimacy among them. But Hamas had the advantage of its Islamic extremism, a powerful drug to the dispossessed youth, epitomised further by the hero worship they bestowed on Osama bin Laden, who had repeatedly proclaimed, “There will be no solution to the Palestinian problem except through jihad.” As the second Intifada continued to explode in
a succession of fiery pyres, Arafat had seen his own infrastructure destroyed by Israel’s sophisticated weapons, guided to their targets by the superb intelligence of Mossad and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service. In what Mossad analysts saw as a last desperate attempt to bolster his ailing leadership, Yasser Arafat had begun to claim that his way of carefully controlled political tension was the only means to pressure Israel into accepting his demand for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. By the time of his death, Arafat had attracted a considerable body of support among influential Palestinians. For Ariel Sharon the risk of Arafat being granted the martyrdom he was rapidly attracting among moderate Palestinians, while at the same time Hamas continued its violence, was totally unacceptable.

  The specialists had known from many years of listening to tapes recorded by the yaholomin, Mossad’s communication unit, that Arafat had often spoken of his conviction that he had been chosen to lead the Arab world, a stepping stone to his assuming the mantle of a modern-day caliph; the position of leadership had been handed down from the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s successors in the seventh century.

  This fantasy had succoured Arafat during his darkest hours in exile and those turbulent years he had railed that the very existence of Israel was at the root of all problems, not only for the Arab nations but the entire Muslim world. In Washington and elsewhere it was long argued there was no point in listening to the rant of a demagogue whose sole message was one of violence.

  But on the sixth floor the specialists knew it would be dangerous to ignore Arafat’s words. While he and his associates no longer controlled terrorist operations, or at least very few, Arafat’s ideology had inspired many young jihadists to see in his words that they had a sacred duty to somehow strike back at the West for actions in Muslim states. Following the emotional scenes at Arafat’s funeral, Mossad katsas across the Middle East, in Kashmir and Chechnya, had all reported his death had stirred up passions.

  A priority for the specialists was to show the billion-strong Islamic world that Yasser Arafat was never worthy of being a successor to Abdul Mejid II, the last caliph who had gone into exile after Turkish Nationalists, on March 3, 1924, had abolished the caliphate. Turkey’s leader, Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, turned what remained of the Ottoman Empire, broken up at the end of the First World War, into a secular republic and forced through the wholesale adoption of European legal codes, writing, and a calendar. The seeds of jihad had been sewn.

  In Egypt there followed agitation against British colonialism. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, became a potent political force; and when Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a coup in 1952, he succeeded with their help. But Nasser soon saw the Brotherhood’s extremism as a threat and banned the movement. Its members were exiled, jailed, or hanged. Many found refuge in monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It was then that Arafat and Osama bin Laden had become radicalized.

  Both men, very different in their backgrounds, were influenced by a number of factors: Israel’s defeat of Arab armies in 1967; Saudi Arabia’s petrodollars, which gave Islamists the funds to proselytize around the Muslim world; and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, which overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year, was a rallying call to wage jihad against the Soviet Union, funded by Saudi money and equipped with American weapons and with the full support of the Pakistan secret services.

  The only blip in the ever-expanding militancy in the Islamic world was the assassination of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat in 1981 after he signed a peace treaty with Israel. Arab leaders incarcerated their own extremists.

  “For the first time the West had become aware of what Israel had been saying for years about the danger of Islamic Fundamentalism,” said David Kimche, a former deputy director of Mossad (to the author).

  But the radicalization, exploited by both bin Laden and Arafat, went unchecked. The United States became the Great Satan, the Infidel Empire. The deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 further radicalized the Muslim world.

  It was at this stage that the specialists on the sixth floor had decided that Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden chose separate paths to achieve their aims, with bin Laden determining the way forward was to wage war against Israel’s powerful ally, the United States. In 1993 came the bombing of the World Trade Center that brought terrorism home to America. In 1998, from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, announced they were forming the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” They issued a fatwa declaring that “it is the duty of every Muslim to kill Americans and Jews.”

  On October 12, 2000, suicide bombers rammed a dinghy packed with explosives into the side of the American warship, the USS Cole, in Aden, killing seventeen sailors. Two years later, on November 28, 2002, in Mombassa, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel. Ten Kenyans and three Israeli tourists were killed. At the same time a surface-to-air missile narrowly missed an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombassa airport with two hundred tourists returning home to Tel Aviv.

  Petro-Islam terrorism had risen from the ruins of Arab nationalism. The “impious” precepts of the shah of Persia’s regime had been replaced by the tenets of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which had spread beyond the borders of Iran to become the focus of hope in the greater Muslim world. The politicizing of Islam—until then largely seen in the West as a conservative faith losing its grip in the face of the growing influence of what bin Laden would call “the Coca-Cola society of the Great Satan”—had become a fully fledged revolution. Its first target, and never to lose that position, was Israel. Its defence against a stream of attacks fell upon Mossad. To destroy Arafat, his fedayeen, Hamas, and Hezbollah became prime objectives.

  Syria had been quick to support these groups for a self-serving reason: it gave the regime credibility in the Arab world over its long-running enmity toward Israel. But it had become a double-edged sword. While Syrian-sponsored terrorist attacks had indeed finally persuaded Israel to negotiate over the Golan Heights—a precursor for what happened over the removal of the settlers from Gaza—its continued investment in terrorism had reinforced Israeli public opinion not to trust Damascus. Nevertheless, the removal of the Gaza settlements, as the promised precursor for a lasting peace for Israel, had resulted in growing resentment among a population who ironically began to echo the Hamas slogan that attacks would end only when every Jew was driven into the sea.

  Mossad’s analysts concluded that one way to win back support for the “road map” to peace was to carefully demolish Yasser Arafat’s legacy. To do so, its Technical Services Department mobilized its skills in using the latest information technology. From the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, Arab terror groups, such as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, had used the Internet to promote their aims. Easy to set up, free to access, hard to censor, cyberspace had become an ideal place for issuing policy statements, claiming responsibility for terror attacks, appealing for funds, offering weapons and explosives training, and selling anything from suicide vests to the ingredients to create biological or germ warfare agents.

  Mossad had been probably the first security service to monitor the Internet; as militants recognized that their mosques were almost certainly under surveillance, Web sites offered a new and relatively safe way to communicate with their followers. Mossad had created a large number of its own Web sites on which they posted carefully constructed disinformation in all the languages of the Middle East.

  In the aftermath of Arafat’s death, stories began to appear on the sites claiming Arafat had betrayed his own people for his own aggrandizement and noting his lack of moral probity. The sites claimed that vast sums of money intended to improve the lives of poverty-stricken Palestinians had ended up in Arafat’s private portfolio.

  The claims were the wor
k of the dozen psychologists in LAP, Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare. It had a long history of creating discord among Israel’s enemies. Arafat’s death had offered a further opportunity for LAP to show its skills.

  Working with information from Mossad’s twenty-four stations around the world, the psychologists had proved that Arafat controlled a financial portfolio estimated to be in the region of US$6.5 billion. Yet the Palestinian Authority, which administered the PLO territories in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, was close to bankruptcy.

  LAP had planted a story in a Cairo-based newspaper, Al-Ahram Weekly, that Abdul Jawwad Saleh, a leading member of the Authority, wanted Arafat’s financial adviser, Mohammed Rachid—who controlled the PLO portfolio—to be questioned. Soon newspapers and TV stations in the Gulf Straits, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon found themselves in possession of copies of a highly secret PLO report that showed that for years the PLO had a deficit of over US$95 million a month. The story became even more explosive when the IMF (International Monetary Fund) revealed Arafat had diverted “one billion U.S. dollars or more of PLO funds from 1995 to 2000.”

  The story swept like a desert storm through the Arab world. A Palestinian lawyer who had investigated PLO corruption said he knew of four Arafat loyalists who held secret Swiss bank accounts. The lawyer provided details of widespread corruption. He revealed (to the author on a guarantee of anonymity): “The deals involved the cement and building industries of the Palestinian territories. The corruption ran into millions of dollars, which Arafat covered up in return for the profiteers giving him a portion. He was the godfather of all the other godfathers.”